Henning Burdack writes "Eric Lerner talks on Google Tech Talks about Focus Fusion, which would be a much cheaper and more feasible technology as a fusion energy source than any other current approach, based upon the dense plasma focus device. The technology will use hydrogen-boron fusion with direct induction of ion energy and photovoltaic conversion of x-ray emission, obviating the need of a steam-cycle and thus resulting in higher efficiencies. High temperatures of 1 billion Kelvin (100 keV) have been reached years ago. It only needs $2 million in funding and two years of research for a proof of concept, and maybe four more years for a prototype with positive energy output. In contrast to other fusion efforts it utilizes the natural instabilities of plasma instead of fighting them. Focus Fusion has been discussed on Slashdot before, and a patent application is also available, going a bit more into detail."
I looked at the wiki history page on aneuronic fusion, and found that wiki poster 'elerner' had been banned from further edits.
Now here he is introducing a project that requires millions of dollars in funding.
Ok, I'm a bit cynical, but this does look like a possible conflict of interest to me.
What, because being banned from Wikipedia edits is the best criteria for judging someone's scientific credentials?
By itself no, however his wiki entry [wikipedia.org] create strong suspicion of crackpottery:
-graduate without completing a degree
-author of alternative cosmology theory denying Big Bang
-denial of quasar as blackholes
-life-long political activist
He's doing experiments on this now half funded by a university and has had funding from JPL for developing this as an energy source for propulsion until NASAs alternative propulsion budget was cut to zero.
BTW he was banned for reverting libellous material and attempts to imply that things like joining a political organisation make him untrustworthy (well, I suppose he was technically a politician, so maybe he was) and for bigging himself up too persistently - the latter only proves he's a self-righteous arse - so often a problem for scientists.
> author of alternative cosmology theory denying Big Bang
No he's not, the cosmology theory is by a nobel prize winning cosmologist. He wrote a book to publicise the theory.
> denial of quasar as blackholes
There is no evidence that they are black holes. They a big and dense. It is not known whether or not they have a large mass behind an event horizon entirely separated from the rest of the universe - we merely have no popular theory to establish that they are not black holes but that doesn't make them so. Assertions that they are and must be black holes and that alternative theories makes you a "DENIER" is far more crackpottish.
> life-long political activist
What does that have to do with his theories on the use of established fundamental quantum limits on bremsstrahlung and synchrotron radiation for sustaining plasma energy in a DPF plasmoid?
Yes, lets all stop doing science... Damn that science.
You know, there are far to many oversensitive pansies on WP. Oh, and biographical statements about living persons must cite appropriate references. Your opinion contravenes this, as well as WP:NPOV and WP:OR. As such, I am reverting your statement. ~~~~
Low enough that someone might come up with the amount and a "hey, what if it works?...". If he had asked for $2 billion, the financiers would insist on a very tightly controlled cash management. $2 million is low enough that he might be left controlling the purse strings.
If a proof of concept can be done with $2 million, then he should do first a basic prototype in his hobby shop. After all, people have built Farnsworth fusors [wikipedia.org] for decades, and still no one would claim the
There are picture of these "contraptions" er prototypes all over the site
Billion Degree Breakthrough at Texas A&M [focusfusion.org] In May of 2001, Experiments at Texas A&M University confirmed predictions from Lerner theory that energies above 100 keV (equivalent to 1.1 billion degrees) can be achieved with the plasma focus. This was a big step taken towards environmentally safe, cheap, and unlimited energy.
Seems like if that was bullshit someone would call him on it, rather than invite him over for a Google tech t
Before the Texas A&M experiments he, apparently, had funding through the NASA advanced propulsion budget, it was actually being funded as an impulse engine:)
Mr. Burdack has been pushing Focus Fusion for some time. For example, his letter to the German Chancellor [google.com] (translated by Google), saying basically the same thing as the intro to the story.
Whether this comment has merit right now doesn't matter to me right now. THIS is the reason I love reading slashdot. What other news aggregation site has members who can find stuff like that. First post no less. There is a very distinct intelligence difference here.
On the topic itself: It seems energy research has started getting a lot more attention than even cancer research now. Cancer research reports have gotten to the point where you now only hear about it when they have actually done somthing. Energy research postings are still at the stage where they only need to talk about maybe being able to do somthing for it to be newsworthy. I wonder when this will change again, and what it will change to.
Notice the ppl who are trying to control this article. They are not even physicists. One of them is a software engineer (and in this day and age, everybody who is in the software world claims to be a software engineer, even though the majority have CIS degrees).
Personally, I am starting to think that he is getting a bit of a bum rap on this. It makes me wonder what is true on wiki. While I like that wiki is taking time to check things, perhaps, it is time for wiki to have subject matter experts do the rev
Ok, this is waaay off topic, and just shows how ignorant I am, but what the heck is a software engineer, and how do they differ from us plain old programmers? Personally, I choose the title of "God Emperor" whenever I'm allowed to choose a title:-) I even occasionally get junk mail directed towards "God Emperor".
Well, first, I my degree is in Computer Science Degree (well, one of them).
A Software Engineer has more of an engineering background. That is they spend more of their education background learning about methodologies according to Engineers (i.e. they write to a spec). They spend their time debating UML design vs. Waterfall.
A CSers was taught how to get the most efficient code, and how to jump all over. Roughly, the vast majority of new ideas in computers come from the CS world. Generally, this background
Notice: Elerner is banned from editing this article.
The user specified has been banned by the Arbitration committee from editing this article indefinitely. The user is not prevented from discussing or proposing changes on this talk page.
Posted by Thatcher131 03:01, 3 December 2006 (UTC) for the Arbitration committee. See Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Pseudoscience.
The bolding is mine.
Gawd!!! I must be bored today. I'm replying to an AC!
agreed. The number is suspiciously low. It is small enough for private funding, however, which puts it deep into possible scam territory. If this has been around for a while and the guy is publicly looking for money it implies he has already been refused for a bunch of grants. If there are no refused grant applications, then it gets more creepy. The patent may be another sign.
IMHO anyone interested in investing in this guy who is not a university or reserch institute should be extremely careful. Like put a radio ankle bracelet on him careful.
by Anonymous Coward
on Saturday October 27 2007, @04:55PM (#21143149)
I don't know about this guy's background, but so far (still watching) he hasn't said anything crazy that signifies obvious crack-pottery. There's been o zero-point energy nonsense, and he's using standard terminology to explain things in a way that would make sense to someone with a little background in the subject. The new bit seems to be clever use of plasma instability to get the energy density required to initiate fusion. I'm not a plasma physicist (just particle physics), so I can't critically evaluate the details of the method. So far I'd believe this is plausible, but I don't know enough to be willing to give this guy any money.
And for gosh-sakes, fix the article summary. keV = kilo electron volts, not Kelvin!
I'd say do be careful. If the guy is a flake (and I have no knowledge either way) then is it possible he's keeping something alive that should be kept alive despite this? If there's value in the science and he's just doing a cut & paste plus control & money trip, it could sink the idea as surely as linking it to Atlantis.
However the percentage of nice people vs egregiously annoying people among good scientists probably correlates well with the population at large, so it's important to discriminate
This is one of a number of devices that can produce some fusion, but don't put out more energy than is put in. Forty years ago, this idea looked more promising. There was a fusion demo of a "plasma pinch" fusion system at the General Electric pavilion of the 1964 World's Fair. So far, no variation on this scheme has come even close to breakeven.
He said it was crackpot. I didn't try to get him to go into details, but he basically mentioned the same stuff you did - stellarators, etc. What's more, there is the crack-pottery in the clip about how all the people in the field are in a conspiracy to deny his idea funding. I know these people - you might find some or even a majority who would be so unscrupulous, but nowhere near enough to maintain such a conspiracy. So, I would tend to think that you're right.
Basically, this guy is probably guilty of exactly what he accuses the rest of the fusion community of - he's fixated on his idea. He apparently won funding from the navy [slashdot.org], so there's a chance his group could prove me wrong, and I hope that they do, but I doubt it.
That last link is to a different project: Bussard's Polywell fusor. That one is scientifically sound and is currently the most hopeful method of energy-positive fusion. Bussard built several working models before he died earlier this year.
As far as sound physics are concerned, neither is to be given much weight. Both require non equilibrium plasmas to work as advertised and that just does not work (The ions collide with electrons far more often than they fuse). In fact unless they can find a massive flaw in our current understanding of plasma physic thermodynamics neither can break even. Well the Bussard one defiantly, since its constant state. At least this one is a pulse device (aka not in equilibrium).
Pretending that this is a non issue without backing up with some calculations/data is bad science. Especially when there is quite a lot of analysis indicating that at best they get around 3-5% of the power out as they put in (real devices less than 0.001% or worse). Thus without some high efficiency (>>90%) power recirculation method they can't work as a power production device.
This view is the general consensus of held by physicist, not just my view.
Both require non equilibrium plasmas to work as advertised and that just does not work (The ions collide with electrons far more often than they fuse). In fact unless they can find a massive flaw in our current understanding of plasma physic thermodynamics neither can break even. Well the Bussard one defiantly, since its constant state.
And Bussard had responded directly to that issue:
Ions spend less than 1/1000 of their lifetime in the dense, high energy but low cross-section core region, and the ratio of Coulomb energy exchange cross-section to fusion cross-section is much less than this, thus thermalization (Maxwellianization) can not occur during a single pass of ions through the core. While some up- and down- scattering does occur in such a single pass, this is so small that edge region collisionality (where the ions are dense and "cold") anneals this out at each pass through the system, thus avoiding buildup of energy spreading in the ion population (Ref. 14).
In layman's terms, the Polywell design fuses ions faster than they maxwellianize, thanks to the ratio of time in core to time in edge. The full high level paper from Bussard can be found here [askmar.com].
You only need to maintain the non-maxwellian distribution long enough for the ions to fuse before they maxwellianize. Thermalization in the outer edge dominates the coulomb interactions from the core more than the collisions dominate the fusion rates. Those are the conditions that allow fusion to occur faster than maxwellianization. No magic, no violation of physics, just a beneficial design that Rider and Nevins both overlooked in their assumptions.
This view is the general consensus of held by physicist, not just my view. And it's a very good thing that science isn't a democracy. There are many researchers who do not agree with the consensus. Some from MIT [mit.edu] and University of Wisconsin-Madison [wisc.edu].
First of all I am not a layman. I am a physicist, and electrostatic fusion has been a hobby of mine for some time. There is a link you didn't specify I think too. Also the link to the other/. article is in fact to this guys work, not Bussards, also the guy in question even posts.
Anyway I have read all the stuff I could find on his device and other ES confinment devices. I think the paper you want to ref is:
"The Advent of Clean Nuclear Fusion: Superperformance Space Power and Propulsion", Bussard, Robert W.,57th International Astronautical Congress (IAC 2006).
This and all other "publications" of his do not explain anything. They just assert that some fact is correct, often in the face of other facts. No math, no explanation on other experiments, no justifications at all. Example in the above he claims the following: "giving DD fusions at
over 100,000x higher output (at 1E9 fus/sec) than all prior
similar work at comparable drive conditions (Ref. 3)." yet normal commercial neutron source fusors get 1e9 events per second wikipedia [wikipedia.org] and 1e8 are achieved at lower voltages and don't need high B fields, and also where are the error bars? Then there are scaling laws which are simply not backed up. In fact with everything I have read it appears that its made up.
And for the ions to fuse faster than they thermalise would require some black magic in terms of plasma density and thermodynamics and charge distributions, or he thought everyones data on fusion reaction cross sections is completely wrong (and thats arguing against a lot of experimental data from a lot of different places). And I'm assuming D T reactions. P B are 1000's of times worse.
You can't do physics without some theroy to back you up. You can't answer critics that use theroy that has shown to be a good model in similar situations without justifying why the model is not good in your case. Bussards work does not have or do that. Plain and simple.
his view is the general consensus of held by physicist, not just my view.
And it's a very good thing that science isn't a democracy. There are many researchers who do not agree with the consensus. Some from MIT and University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Funny how this view changes with the Global warming debate when someone points out flaws in current models.
Electrostatic fusion is viewed as a black horse, but if you have a good paper on it, it will get published. We want to believe that it can be done. But you must back up your position and at least address known issues with proper exploration of the appropriate models. Just claiming your right and they are wrong is not science.
What's more, there is the crack-pottery in the clip about how all the people in the field are in a conspiracy to deny his idea funding.
I've watched the video once and skipped through a second time now...I don't see where you got this from. Can you provide a time reference?
Also, as far as crack-pottery goes, is there anything statement from him that isn't true, or grounded in real science? In the comments here today I see a few "...sounds fishy to me..." type statements but no one points to anything
For the technical problems, look no further than BlueParrot's [slashdot.org] comment a little ways down thread.
For the crackpot-esque funding claims, just look for his claims about the DOE "defending their rice bowl." If you had any idea how the funding process works you'd know that the decisions of who to give a grant to aren't directed primarily by a bunch of territorial bureaucrats, it's made by scientists, his fellow peers who would actually be able to measure the merits of what he is proposing better than anyone. Fra
Are you talking about Lerner or Bussard? I'm confused on who this thread is on about?
The "defending their rice bowl" comment and the Navy funding was Bussard, but the comments about "he", "him" and "his" don't indicate that the comments are about anybody but the topic of the slashdot article - ie, Lerner.
This is one of a number of devices that can produce some fusion, but don't put out more energy than is put in. Forty years ago, this idea looked more promising. There was a fusion demo of a "plasma pinch" fusion system at the General Electric pavilion of the 1964 World's Fair. So far, no variation on this scheme has come even close to breakeven.
Of course fifty years ago we didn't know about the time cube so it's no wonder it didn't work...
(haven't read TFA, so don't really have an opinion on focus fusion anyway)
In a proper and decent world, men like Robert Bussard would be heroes to our children, and household names that have high schools named after them... his concept of a fusion ramjet, the Bussard Ramjet, from Known Space and other places... is still the only realistically viable idea for intersteller travel...
IANANP... would love someone who is to break this video and it's ideas down... would it work?
While I have no problem with Bussard as an interesting engineer the fusion ramjet is (sadly) not even a little bit viable.
Briefly there are two problems:
1. ordinary hydrogen is very hard to fuse. Even at the centre of the sun the average proton takes about 10^10 years to fuse. Since the comrpressed interstellar gas is streaming through your ship at roughly lightspeed, even if "pinch" in your magnetic fields is 1km long, you have to get a decent proportion of it to fuse in 3 microseconds, so you need to achieve, in your pinch, temperature and density far far higher than at the centre of the sun. This seems difficult at best.
2. the interstellar medium (we now know) is best thought of as more like a froth than a uniform gas. Supernova shocks and other upsets clear "bubbles" and after a while almost all the gas ends up packed into relatively thin "bubble walls". Incoveniently, the Sun is sitting in the middle of a bubble several light-years across, so the interstellar gas is a very very thin round here.
by Anonymous Coward
on Saturday October 27 2007, @05:18PM (#21143345)
These people invariably claim that their research has been suppressed. If we've learned one thing from magnetic fusion research in the 20th century, it's this: Fusion is Difficult. Believing that it's easy just leads to disappointment.
One factor of many: plasmas are prone to a host of instabilities, and 'stability' usually involves tradeoffs between one type of instability and another. So when somebody tells you "my plasma is stable", it should set off warning bells. The honest man will tell you the limits of stability.
As Artsimovich put it so eloquently in 1961, "Initial belief that the doors to the desired region would open smoothly at the first powerful pressure exerted by the creative energy of physicists has proved as unfounded as the sinner's hope of entering Paradise without passing through Purgatory. We do not know how long we will be in Purgatory."
We got into the Space Age by way of the Cold War, but what will push us into the Fusion Age?
Unfortunately not. While oil will run out within decades, there is still plenty of coal and gas around. Quite enough of it to cause incalculable damage to the world if we don't stop using it. Fusion will probably not get popular until it can demonstrate lower prices than fission.
High temperatures is not the problem, D-T fusion only requires some 16keV, and this is easily achievable using rather cheap voltage source. However, to get more energy out than you get in, you must ensure that this energy stays in the plasma and causes fusion, rather than just radiating right out of it again. In practice this means you need a high density and large confinement time ( basically a measure of how rapidly the plasma loses energy ).
Now, the issue with fusion using fuels with higher atomic number than hydrogen is that the plasma will contain much more electrons, and this dramatically increases the amount of energy lost as bremsstrahlung when the electrons collide with the nuclei (the increased mass of the nuclei also plays a part ). Direct conversion of X-rays could theoretically help alleviate this as it would allow you to feed the lost energy back into the plasma, problem is, photo-voltaics have nowhere close to 100% efficiency.
Aneutronic fusion has advantages. You don't have to worry about neutron damage to the reactor vessel. However, when you look a bit closer at it, this isn't such a large advantage after all, because the neutrons are actually quite useful in that they deposit the energy over a quite large volume when they are being absorbed, reducing the stress caused by heating in the device. If it wasn't for the neutrons you would see most of the heat deposited in a comparably thin layer of the plasma-facing compounds. The counter for this is that aneutronic fusion releases the energy as charged particles, potentially allowing for directly converting the energy into electricity.
Basically, what this whole thing boils down to, is if you are able to achieve sufficiently good direct-conversion efficiency to counteract the increased X-ray losses due to the higher atomic numbers associated with aneutronic fusion. This is why you often see claims of breakthroughs in aneutronic fusion together with claims of either a non-maxwellian velocity distribution or some other remarkable way to reduce X-ray losses. A plasma with a maxwellian velocity distribution cannot sustain aneutronic fusion without being either very large and dense (to re-capture the X-rays) or by somehow capturing the lost X-rays after they leave the plasma and feeding the energy back into it.
For a non-maxwellian velocity distribution your problem is that even at optimal energies a collision is much more likely to scatter the ions than it is to cause fusion, and restoring the non-maxwellian velocity distribution will require energy (no, you don't get to violate the second law of thermodynamics I'm afraid ). For capturing X-rays your problem is to achieve a good enough conversion efficiency to make up for the dramatically increased X-ray losses.
With the exception of a few unconfirmed claims, nobody has been able to resolve the above problems (thou Bussard was quite vocal about his polywell device ) and this is pretty much why modern fusion power research uses D-T fusion. It gives the highest amount of energy for the lowest temperature and X-ray losses, at a maxwellian velocity distribution.
This cuts to the heart of why I'd always questioned the viability of small scale fusion reactors. The sun is a wonderfully efficent fusion reactor because it uses it's mass to contain the reaction and keep it self perpetuating. I've yet to see any form of reactor show the same promise for generating energy. The best so far involves unselfsustained reactions. Break even is seen as the holly grail with each method but without a self sustained reaction it's a very big expensive money pit that produces no power
Break even is seen as the holly grail with each method but without a self sustained reaction it's a very big expensive money pit that produces no power.
Not true. My above post highlighted problems with using high Z number ions because the large quantity of electrons, and relatively low fusion energy gain, makes it difficult to overcome the energy losses. For D-T fusion however ( and possibly D-D fusion ) , the fusion energy is both every high, and can occur at ( relatively speaking ) lower temperatures. As
One of the hangups I have heard about D-T fusion (OK, OK, I heard it from those wacky The Oil Drum dudes) is that to set up a working DT fusion economy, you have to take into account the doubling time of the amount of tritium that you breed, and there is concern that the doubling time is such that we will run out of oil before the industry has enough time for one D-T reactor to breed enough T for the next pair of D-T reactors which in turn "beget" the next pair of pairs of D-T reactors.
I'm a bit confused. Is this somehow based on the polywell concept: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell [wikipedia.org] I heard Dr. Bussard's name floated in there but it seems like it's a somwhat different process. In any case, I was excited when I first started reading the page. Then after a few passages I wasn't so sure. Not I'm even less so.
I have no idea whether there's any chance focus fusion could work. But I do believe it has probably been a terrible mistake to have put all our eggs in the tokamak basket for all these years. When you don't know how to solve a problem, it's critical to keep exploring alternative approaches, especially if they're radically different. I would love to see substantially more funding for focus fusion, electrostatic confinement fusion, sonofusion, and even good old Pons and Fleischmann style cold fusion. The total would still be small compared to tokamak funding -- and who knows, maybe one of them would work out, or maybe we would learn something that turned out to be useful in the tokamak.
While there certainly are crackpots out there, I think we're too quick to dismiss ideas outside the mainstream, too eager to congratulate ourselves for knowing the truth already when we clearly don't know all of it. We need to cultivate more humility in the face of the mystery of the unknown.
Ever since i saw the polywell http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell/ [wikipedia.org] 6 months ago, i have spent every waking moment researching these new approaches to fusion.
Plasmas found in fusion typically display a maxwellian particle distribution. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell-Boltzmann_distribution/ [wikipedia.org] This basically states that there are different numbers of particles containing a different amount of energy.
The fact there are so many particles moving at different energies gives rise to a phenomena called Bremstrahlung radiation (german for braking)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bremsstrahlung_radiation/ [wikipedia.org] this is when particles collide with electrons giving up energy. Bremstrahlung and synchrotron radiation are two main energy loss mechanisms in fusion power schemes. Focus fusion is maxwellian and suffers from the above.
Sadly the inventor of the polywell Dr. Robert W Bussard passed away on the 06/10/07. He was dearly mourned by the fusion community. In many of his papers and in his final interview http://www.americanantigravity.com/graphics/interviews/Robert-Bussard-Interview.wma/ [americanantigravity.com] he stated that only non maxwellian fusion regimes can hope to achieve above break even power.
Tri alpha energy recieved 40million in venture capitol for its idea. Focus fusion are rallying for support, and the polywell has finally recieved some limited investment from the navy to repeat WB 6's results of 10^9 neutrons per second. The polywell is non maxwellian fusion regime that is basically a 150kev particle accelerator utilizing a virtual cathode. It is in my opinion the only machine that will achieve beyond break even power, yet despite this it has suffered from an crippling lack of investment and interest. As we speak now WB 7 is being constucted and should have results by May next year. If all goes well in the next few months expect big things.
We are about to witness another Manhattan Project !
Except for the recent and obvious example of Dr. Robert Bussard's Inertial Electro-static Confinment method
Indeed. Unfortunately Dr Bussard has passed away recently. However the project has funding again, and apparently they are builing a new prototype, WB7.
Why even now, there are companies that are trying to produce jets that cost 1/2 of the comparable jet from the big players. And even more amazing, is that companies like Spacex is producing a rocket for about 1/3 of the launch cost of something similar by Boeing AND l-mart. And now, there is a company who is claiming to produce SPACE station at a fraction of the costs of the ISS.
Yes, when ppl and companies come along claiming to do something at a fraction of the price, you KNOW they must be fleecing. BTW,
If it's that rare, wouldn't it have been overkill to use twenty-mule teams to haul borax out of the desert?
Without bothering to look it up, it seems like global consumption of a fusion fuel wouldn't be more than a couple of thousand tons per year. Boron compounds are a commodity that's currently consumed on the scale of a million tons per year.
Possible conflict of interest (Score:5, Interesting)
Now here he is introducing a project that requires millions of dollars in funding.
Ok, I'm a bit cynical, but this does look like a possible conflict of interest to me.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Possible conflict of interest (Score:5, Informative)
By itself no, however his wiki entry [wikipedia.org] create strong suspicion of crackpottery:
-graduate without completing a degree
-author of alternative cosmology theory denying Big Bang
-denial of quasar as blackholes
-life-long political activist
Parent
Re:Possible conflict of interest (Score:5, Insightful)
BTW he was banned for reverting libellous material and attempts to imply that things like joining a political organisation make him untrustworthy (well, I suppose he was technically a politician, so maybe he was) and for bigging himself up too persistently - the latter only proves he's a self-righteous arse - so often a problem for scientists.
> author of alternative cosmology theory denying Big Bang
No he's not, the cosmology theory is by a nobel prize winning cosmologist. He wrote a book to publicise the theory.
> denial of quasar as blackholes
There is no evidence that they are black holes. They a big and dense. It is not known whether or not they have a large mass behind an event horizon entirely separated from the rest of the universe - we merely have no popular theory to establish that they are not black holes but that doesn't make them so. Assertions that they are and must be black holes and that alternative theories makes you a "DENIER" is far more crackpottish.
> life-long political activist
What does that have to do with his theories on the use of established fundamental quantum limits on bremsstrahlung and synchrotron radiation for sustaining plasma energy in a DPF plasmoid?
Yes, lets all stop doing science... Damn that science.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Another telltale (Score:2)
Low enough that someone might come up with the amount and a "hey, what if it works?...". If he had asked for $2 billion, the financiers would insist on a very tightly controlled cash management. $2 million is low enough that he might be left controlling the purse strings.
If a proof of concept can be done with $2 million, then he should do first a basic prototype in his hobby shop. After all, people have built Farnsworth fusors [wikipedia.org] for decades, and still no one would claim the
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Seems like if that was bullshit someone would call him on it, rather than invite him over for a Google tech t
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Re:Possible conflict of interest (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
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Cheap energy on the other hand, is the next best thing to curing cancer & not as many organizations are setup asking for money to research it yet.
Ok, but (Score:2)
Personally, I am starting to think that he is getting a bit of a bum rap on this. It makes me wonder what is true on wiki. While I like that wiki is taking time to check things, perhaps, it is time for wiki to have subject matter experts do the rev
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which says ( for those who don't RTFA )
Notice: Elerner is banned from editing this article. The user specified has been banned by the Arbitration committee from editing this article indefinitely. The user is not prevented from discussing or proposing changes on this talk page. Posted by Thatcher131 03:01, 3 December 2006 (UTC) for the Arbitration committee. See Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Pseudoscience.
The bolding is mine.
Gawd!!! I must be bored today. I'm replying to an AC!
Another Company... (Score:2)
Google for "Tri-Alpha Energy"
Re:Another Company... (Score:5, Insightful)
IMHO anyone interested in investing in this guy who is not a university or reserch institute should be extremely careful. Like put a radio ankle bracelet on him careful.
Parent
So far not so crazy (Score:5, Informative)
I don't know about this guy's background, but so far (still watching) he hasn't said anything crazy that signifies obvious crack-pottery. There's been o zero-point energy nonsense, and he's using standard terminology to explain things in a way that would make sense to someone with a little background in the subject. The new bit seems to be clever use of plasma instability to get the energy density required to initiate fusion. I'm not a plasma physicist (just particle physics), so I can't critically evaluate the details of the method. So far I'd believe this is plausible, but I don't know enough to be willing to give this guy any money.
And for gosh-sakes, fix the article summary. keV = kilo electron volts, not Kelvin!
So many ACs (Score:3, Funny)
Is that you, Eric?
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However the percentage of nice people vs egregiously annoying people among good scientists probably correlates well with the population at large, so it's important to discriminate
More of a research device (Score:5, Informative)
This is one of a number of devices that can produce some fusion, but don't put out more energy than is put in. Forty years ago, this idea looked more promising. There was a fusion demo of a "plasma pinch" fusion system at the General Electric pavilion of the 1964 World's Fair. So far, no variation on this scheme has come even close to breakeven.
Asked a Plasma Physicist About This (Score:5, Interesting)
Basically, this guy is probably guilty of exactly what he accuses the rest of the fusion community of - he's fixated on his idea. He apparently won funding from the navy [slashdot.org], so there's a chance his group could prove me wrong, and I hope that they do, but I doubt it.
Parent
Re:Asked a Plasma Physicist About This (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:Asked a Plasma Physicist About This (Score:4, Informative)
Pretending that this is a non issue without backing up with some calculations/data is bad science. Especially when there is quite a lot of analysis indicating that at best they get around 3-5% of the power out as they put in (real devices less than 0.001% or worse). Thus without some high efficiency (>>90%) power recirculation method they can't work as a power production device.
This view is the general consensus of held by physicist, not just my view.
Parent
Re:Asked a Plasma Physicist About This (Score:4, Interesting)
And Bussard had responded directly to that issue:
Ions spend less than 1/1000 of their lifetime in the dense, high energy but low cross-section core region, and the ratio of Coulomb energy exchange cross-section to fusion cross-section is much less than this, thus thermalization (Maxwellianization) can not occur during a single pass of ions through the core. While some up- and down- scattering does occur in such a single pass, this is so small that edge region collisionality (where the ions are dense and "cold") anneals this out at each pass through the system, thus avoiding buildup of energy spreading in the ion population (Ref. 14).
In layman's terms, the Polywell design fuses ions faster than they maxwellianize, thanks to the ratio of time in core to time in edge. The full high level paper from Bussard can be found here [askmar.com].
You only need to maintain the non-maxwellian distribution long enough for the ions to fuse before they maxwellianize. Thermalization in the outer edge dominates the coulomb interactions from the core more than the collisions dominate the fusion rates. Those are the conditions that allow fusion to occur faster than maxwellianization. No magic, no violation of physics, just a beneficial design that Rider and Nevins both overlooked in their assumptions.
This view is the general consensus of held by physicist, not just my view.
And it's a very good thing that science isn't a democracy. There are many researchers who do not agree with the consensus. Some from MIT [mit.edu] and University of Wisconsin-Madison [wisc.edu].
Parent
Re:Asked a Plasma Physicist About This (Score:4, Interesting)
Anyway I have read all the stuff I could find on his device and other ES confinment devices. I think the paper you want to ref is:
"The Advent of Clean Nuclear Fusion: Superperformance Space Power and Propulsion", Bussard, Robert W.,57th International Astronautical Congress (IAC 2006).
This and all other "publications" of his do not explain anything. They just assert that some fact is correct, often in the face of other facts. No math, no explanation on other experiments, no justifications at all. Example in the above he claims the following: "giving DD fusions at over 100,000x higher output (at 1E9 fus/sec) than all prior similar work at comparable drive conditions (Ref. 3)." yet normal commercial neutron source fusors get 1e9 events per second wikipedia [wikipedia.org] and 1e8 are achieved at lower voltages and don't need high B fields, and also where are the error bars? Then there are scaling laws which are simply not backed up. In fact with everything I have read it appears that its made up.
And for the ions to fuse faster than they thermalise would require some black magic in terms of plasma density and thermodynamics and charge distributions, or he thought everyones data on fusion reaction cross sections is completely wrong (and thats arguing against a lot of experimental data from a lot of different places). And I'm assuming D T reactions. P B are 1000's of times worse.
You can't do physics without some theroy to back you up. You can't answer critics that use theroy that has shown to be a good model in similar situations without justifying why the model is not good in your case. Bussards work does not have or do that. Plain and simple.
And it's a very good thing that science isn't a democracy. There are many researchers who do not agree with the consensus. Some from MIT and University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Electrostatic fusion is viewed as a black horse, but if you have a good paper on it, it will get published. We want to believe that it can be done. But you must back up your position and at least address known issues with proper exploration of the appropriate models. Just claiming your right and they are wrong is not science.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
What's more, there is the crack-pottery in the clip about how all the people in the field are in a conspiracy to deny his idea funding.
I've watched the video once and skipped through a second time now...I don't see where you got this from. Can you provide a time reference?
Also, as far as crack-pottery goes, is there anything statement from him that isn't true, or grounded in real science? In the comments here today I see a few "...sounds fishy to me..." type statements but no one points to anything
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For the crackpot-esque funding claims, just look for his claims about the DOE "defending their rice bowl." If you had any idea how the funding process works you'd know that the decisions of who to give a grant to aren't directed primarily by a bunch of territorial bureaucrats, it's made by scientists, his fellow peers who would actually be able to measure the merits of what he is proposing better than anyone. Fra
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The "defending their rice bowl" comment and the Navy funding was Bussard, but the comments about "he", "him" and "his" don't indicate that the comments are about anybody but the topic of the slashdot article - ie, Lerner.
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This is one of a number of devices that can produce some fusion, but don't put out more energy than is put in. Forty years ago, this idea looked more promising. There was a fusion demo of a "plasma pinch" fusion system at the General Electric pavilion of the 1964 World's Fair. So far, no variation on this scheme has come even close to breakeven.
Of course fifty years ago we didn't know about the time cube so it's no wonder it didn't work...
(haven't read TFA, so don't really have an opinion on focus fusion anyway)
Good comprehensive video... (Score:4, Interesting)
In a proper and decent world, men like Robert Bussard would be heroes to our children, and household names that have high schools named after them... his concept of a fusion ramjet, the Bussard Ramjet, from Known Space and other places... is still the only realistically viable idea for intersteller travel...
IANANP... would love someone who is to break this video and it's ideas down... would it work?
peace
Re:Good comprehensive video... (Score:5, Informative)
Briefly there are two problems:
1. ordinary hydrogen is very hard to fuse. Even at the centre of the sun the average proton takes about 10^10 years to fuse.
Since the comrpressed interstellar gas is streaming through your ship at roughly lightspeed, even if "pinch" in your magnetic fields is 1km long, you have to get a decent proportion of it to fuse in 3 microseconds, so you need to achieve, in your pinch, temperature and density far far higher than at the centre of the sun. This seems difficult at best.
2. the interstellar medium (we now know) is best thought of as more like a froth than a uniform gas. Supernova shocks and other upsets clear "bubbles" and after a while almost all the gas ends up packed into relatively thin "bubble walls". Incoveniently, the Sun is sitting in the middle of a bubble several light-years across, so the interstellar gas is a very very thin round here.
Steve
Parent
word to the wise (Score:3, Insightful)
One factor of many: plasmas are prone to a host of instabilities, and 'stability' usually involves tradeoffs between one type of instability and another. So when somebody tells you "my plasma is stable", it should set off warning bells. The honest man will tell you the limits of stability.
As Artsimovich put it so eloquently in 1961, "Initial belief that the doors to the desired region would open smoothly at the first powerful pressure exerted by the creative energy of physicists has proved as unfounded as the sinner's hope of entering Paradise without passing through Purgatory. We do not know how long we will be in Purgatory."
We got into the Space Age by way of the Cold War, but what will push us into the Fusion Age?
Re: (Score:2)
Here we go again. (Score:5, Informative)
Now, the issue with fusion using fuels with higher atomic number than hydrogen is that the plasma will contain much more electrons, and this dramatically increases the amount of energy lost as bremsstrahlung when the electrons collide with the nuclei (the increased mass of the nuclei also plays a part ). Direct conversion of X-rays could theoretically help alleviate this as it would allow you to feed the lost energy back into the plasma, problem is, photo-voltaics have nowhere close to 100% efficiency.
Aneutronic fusion has advantages. You don't have to worry about neutron damage to the reactor vessel. However, when you look a bit closer at it, this isn't such a large advantage after all, because the neutrons are actually quite useful in that they deposit the energy over a quite large volume when they are being absorbed, reducing the stress caused by heating in the device. If it wasn't for the neutrons you would see most of the heat deposited in a comparably thin layer of the plasma-facing compounds. The counter for this is that aneutronic fusion releases the energy as charged particles, potentially allowing for directly converting the energy into electricity.
Basically, what this whole thing boils down to, is if you are able to achieve sufficiently good direct-conversion efficiency to counteract the increased X-ray losses due to the higher atomic numbers associated with aneutronic fusion. This is why you often see claims of breakthroughs in aneutronic fusion together with claims of either a non-maxwellian velocity distribution or some other remarkable way to reduce X-ray losses. A plasma with a maxwellian velocity distribution cannot sustain aneutronic fusion without being either very large and dense (to re-capture the X-rays) or by somehow capturing the lost X-rays after they leave the plasma and feeding the energy back into it.
For a non-maxwellian velocity distribution your problem is that even at optimal energies a collision is much more likely to scatter the ions than it is to cause fusion, and restoring the non-maxwellian velocity distribution will require energy (no, you don't get to violate the second law of thermodynamics I'm afraid ). For capturing X-rays your problem is to achieve a good enough conversion efficiency to make up for the dramatically increased X-ray losses.
With the exception of a few unconfirmed claims, nobody has been able to resolve the above problems (thou Bussard was quite vocal about his polywell device ) and this is pretty much why modern fusion power research uses D-T fusion. It gives the highest amount of energy for the lowest temperature and X-ray losses, at a maxwellian velocity distribution.
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Re: (Score:2)
Not true. My above post highlighted problems with using high Z number ions because the large quantity of electrons, and relatively low fusion energy gain, makes it difficult to overcome the energy losses. For D-T fusion however ( and possibly D-D fusion ) , the fusion energy is both every high, and can occur at ( relatively speaking ) lower temperatures. As
The tritium economy (Score:3, Interesting)
Is this a legitimat
A cluster (Score:2, Funny)
Sounds like a Ford product (Score:3, Funny)
exploding batteries (Score:2)
Prototype Images online ... (Score:2)
(It would a lot funnier without this: [safercar.gov])
Focus Fusion vs Polywell???? (Score:2)
Big Science effect (Score:4, Insightful)
I have no idea whether there's any chance focus fusion could work. But I do believe it has probably been a terrible mistake to have put all our eggs in the tokamak basket for all these years. When you don't know how to solve a problem, it's critical to keep exploring alternative approaches, especially if they're radically different. I would love to see substantially more funding for focus fusion, electrostatic confinement fusion, sonofusion, and even good old Pons and Fleischmann style cold fusion. The total would still be small compared to tokamak funding -- and who knows, maybe one of them would work out, or maybe we would learn something that turned out to be useful in the tokamak.
While there certainly are crackpots out there, I think we're too quick to dismiss ideas outside the mainstream, too eager to congratulate ourselves for knowing the truth already when we clearly don't know all of it. We need to cultivate more humility in the face of the mystery of the unknown.
Exactly why this wont work. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Indeed. Unfortunately Dr Bussard has passed away recently. However the project has funding again, and
apparently they are builing a new prototype, WB7.
There's a discussion site at http://www.talk-polywell.org/ [talk-polywell.org] .
Mike.
Ah yes; Amazing is it not (Score:2)
Yes, when ppl and companies come along claiming to do something at a fraction of the price, you KNOW they must be fleecing. BTW,
Re: (Score:2)
If it's that rare, wouldn't it have been overkill to use twenty-mule teams to haul borax out of the desert?
Without bothering to look it up, it seems like global consumption of a fusion fuel wouldn't be more than a couple of thousand tons per year. Boron compounds are a commodity that's currently consumed on the scale of a million tons per year.